I'm tired.

It has been a tough week. Tough two weeks. Tough three.

It started two years ago with a campaign that seemed as if it would never end.

It ended with me crying in front of my English 11 class because my heart was truly broken.

In between there one of our best friend's, after being a dedicated, 19-year employee lost his job.

Barack won the election. The campaigning is officially over. However, the work now begins, and frankly, I am just tired.

I'm tired of listening to the comments my students make about the new President-Elect. I'm tired of trying to express how it is now our job as a nation to educate ourselves, to eliminate the hatred, to move past the fear, and to pull our country up by the boot straps to make things improve.

But I am, instead, forced to defend my position against uneducated, uninformed, and immature people, and I'm not even talking exclusively about my students.

I watch my closest friends struggle with their sudden and unexplained change in lifestyle. I listen as their family fights and yells about the change in our political landscape, and again, I become extremely tired.

I know that politics are hard...they are time consuming, they are heated, they are difficult to understand and comprehend, and they are more often than not, extremely dark and sketchy.

But they are what they are because we as a nation have spent far too long just turning away, ignoring, and, like the ostrich, burying our heads in the sand. The only thing that comes from acting the part of the ostrich is that by putting your head in the sand, you suffocate.

So, I'm tired. I want people to stop talking ridiculous shit. I want people to start paying attention, and I want our country to pull itself up by the bootstraps and "move on" (to quote a now President-elect's campaign mantra).

My Ethan and Max will be okay. We will make sure they learn and focus and have correct information. We will teach them the difference between anger and facts and we will teach them to make educated decisions. We will not, however, allow them to talk trash or repeat slanderous rhetoric, or make false, unsubstantiated comments.

But my students....what of them? I don't have the ability nor the energy to any longer listen to the trash they spew. How, with this level of exhaustion, the sheer sadness generated by their comments, the pure and unadulterated dread I feel over their complete lack of brains, do I continue focusing on the positive? I know I will, but wow I need a weekend.

Maybe on Monday I won't be so tired.